U.S. & Canadian Poetry - 19th Century - Literary Criticism, Literary Criticism - General & Miscellaneous, Gothic Novel - Literary Movements, Supernatural, 19th Century American Literature - Literary Criticism

Emily Dickinson's gothic

Name: Emily Dickinson's gothic
Author: Daneen Wardrop
ISBN: 9780877455493

by Daneen Wardrop

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Overview

Emily Dickinson's Gothic, the first full length study of Dickinson as a primarily gothic writer, is based upon a recognition of women's gothicism. Daneen Wardrop develops first a definition of the female gothic by reading Helene Cixous reading Freud reading E. T. A. Hoffmann on the uncanny. The result is a language based model for the gothic that exposes some of Dickinson's most encrypted figurations and coerced language, which she used to subvert cultural norms. Emily Dickinson's Gothic also addresses sociohistorical concerns, from hallowed gothic conventions dating from Horace Walpole's eighteenth century to such modernist neogothic topics as rape, the void, and disjunctive language that appear in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Wardrop recognizes the full extent to which the gothic pervades Dickinson's canon and the means by which that gothic determines her aesthetic. Such full consideration of women's gothicism allows the placement of Dickinson within a literary context, both in terms of American writers and in terms of women writers.

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Booknews

By definition "gothic" refers to the secret within a piece of literature which causes fear and hesitation in the reader. Dickinson's work surely fits that description, dramatizing the mysteries of death, artistic creation, femininity, and existential danger ("my life a loaded gun"). Wardrop (English, Western Michigan U.) fleshes out recent studies in the "uncanny" devoting her critical energies to specifically applying Helene Cixous's critical work to Dickinson's poetic strategies and extending the seminal work of critics Gilbert , Gubar, and Cynthia Griffin Wolff. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.